Robert Frost was born in San Francisco in 1874 however after his father's death when young Frost was eleven the family moved to the opposite side of the country- to Massachusetts. This moving was symbolic in a boy's life as it was an attempt to begin a new life and forget about father's death by leaving a place of tragedy. He went to high school in a new state, and entered Dartmouth College later although he didn't stay there for a long time and returned to Massachusetts to teach and work on a few other jobs to support himself and the family. Two years after graduating high school Robert publishes his first poem in the New York Independent "My Butterfly" and he also has five other poems privately printed. In such a young age he already was exposing himself as a talented writer, although those few works were not enough to make a definite statement about his future as a poet.
His poetic career was more than five decades long and throughout that time he created with each of his poems a body of art that was representation of America, such that only a few of his contemporaries could create. He was a man who protected his own independence as nothing else and this attitude is sincerely mirrored in every poem. For instance he wrote in "Build Soil" :"Don't join too many gangs. Join a few if any." Frost is claiming the importance of always staying aside from the groups or gangs as he calls it. He believed that being a part of a certain group leaves you without too much choice and you either have to follow and agree or leave. He was a man of a free spirit and creative thought.
Frost's poetry was not a very light and entertaining piece of literature, and neither was his life. He was struggling with the ultimate connection of the opposites that we are encountering in our lives. Death and birth, black and white, and his inner strong ambition for writing versus deepening depression caused by his personal life were the things that he gives life to on the pages of his books. He was unhappy in his family life, and for an ordinary human it could be a stimulus to die rather than to create something new. Only five years after his successful work was published and brought him transatlantic popularity a trail of tragedies started following the poet, as if he had to pay for the success. In 1920 Frost purchased a farm in South Shaftsbury, Vermont, near Middlebury College. In the subsequent years he has lost four of his six children. Most deaths were dramatic and not ordinary to be happening in the life of a single person. His first born son died from typhoid when he was only four and another committed suicide. His premature daughter died and his sister has gone mad. Clearly those heartbreaks could not have been unnoticed by the paper on which Robert was describing his inner world. Every poem was holding an immortal struggle of the opposites. He easily combined a chaotic world with the systematic orders of the world around him which he found in the everyday life in simple objects such as trees, houses and brooks. Frost was a farmer for a while and he liked to observe nature and a natural order of things that nature provided. This very meditative observations gave him a clearer outlook on the outside and brought it needed balance into his difficult life. Robert has never surrendered to darkness completely, his work as a farmer has given his some light and emotional strength that he speaks of in this works.
Some say that he was a terrifying poet when they mention his "Desert Places". The reason for such a perception is found in the words that are troubling for each human being. He speaks of the empty spaces between the stars that he actually has inside himself. Frost claims that they cannot scare him as he has lived through so many horrible tragedies in his live that have left empty spaces in his heart that he will not be able to fill up ever again. Truth of his destiny can be found in those words as he is attempting to discover a saving oasis in his soul that would bring him back to life. He finds it in his poetry and ocean of words become a stream of phenomenal masterpieces that were born in misery and battling human soul. The author was continually suffering from self doubt the feeling that was also transferred into his work, but at the same time gave a stronger impulse for improvement and discovery of strength in his inner self and the outside beautiful world.